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George isn’t one of the unlucky ones he is one of the lucky ones who is creative enough to invent new things, come up with new ideas, to learn.

It’s then, and only then, that Asimov drops his bombshell on us: the people who aren’t suitable for education are the people who make up the education in the first place.

He rebels, becoming a fugitive of sorts, attempting to find a new place in the world-but ultimately failing and ending up back at his starting point. Asimov highlights this situation through the plight of George, who really, really wants to be a Registered Computer Programmer, only to find out that he isn’t suitable for education at all.įrom this point, the story follows George’s ardent refusal to accept his fate as a ward of the state. Individual freedom, it seems, has been replaced by a collectivist mentality in which one’s labours are allocated to those areas in greatest need. Sinister hints of dystopia slip through the cracks between sentences: this is a society where you are told what your profession will be based on the suitability of your brain chemistry. Then, he uses it to explore the more serious ramifications-namely, if everyone’s knowledge is programmed, who finds new knowledge?Īt the beginning, Profession seems to read like a cautionary tale. Asimov takes a single idea-that we could educate people by downloading the knowledge into their brain instead of devoting hours of arduous teaching to them-and builds a possible society around this idea. It is a textbook example of the kind of basic, fundamental social science fiction that Asimov made so popular and that had such an influence on the field at large. Asimov takes a single idea-that we could educate people by downloading the knowledge into their brain instead of devoting hours of arduous teaching to them-and builds a possible society around this i If I didn’t know that Profession is an Isaac Asimov story, I would be inclined to say that it resembles very much an Isaac Asimov story. If I didn’t know that Profession is an Isaac Asimov story, I would be inclined to say that it resembles very much an Isaac Asimov story.